skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's against most networks' (Visa, etc) TOS to charge before the goods are shipped, but you can usually word things in such a way to get around it, and it's usually not enforced strictly until it becomes a real problem. It's definitely higher risk than paid-on-shipment though.

However, you'll find that the Lockitron guys aren't charging cards until shipment, just getting the preapproval to do so when they're ready to ship. I suppose that means either they have some other funding or means to get it (with nearly $2m in "pledges", it shouldn't be hard to secure a loan for the first run if they need it if they don't want to go the VC route)

So this solves a slightly different problem than Kickstarter, since the people doing preorders aren't providing working capital. Still, it shows that Kickstarter got enough traction that continuing to fly under the radar wasn't possible, or the chargeback rates on preorders was way too high.
So weird to see people complaining about the risk of people half-assing projects on kickstarter because of getting money up front with little assurance. As if angel investing is much different.
> the most original and polished work tends to come from individuals or small teams.

Counterpoint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

Find me a single-authored article that goes into the level of detail on the same topic...
Great questions, I'll answer in-line:

-What if the winning hackers win at two of your events...
-Being that this is invite only - I don't plan on having the same teams at two events.

-Is the money in the form of 'a gift...
-Nope, it's an actual seed investment from an angel group. Terms, equity, etc. will apply (but don't have to be accepted if you'd rather bootstrap)

-Who would collect the money, just one of them in their bank account?
-Good question, and one I need to think more on. The assumption, since it's an investment, is that they'd create a Delaware C corp and it would be property of the newly founded company. We're not directly involved in this process but will be trying to help keep things moving smoothly.

-RE Herding cats:
-Most investments will come after a 3 month 'build-a-thon' for teams that impressed their investor/company partner. Band of Angel investments (aka prizes) might happen at the end of the weekend.
What are your expectations for what happens after the weekend?

Am I expected to make a commitment to pursue this new "startup"?
If I take seed funding, what am I agreeing to do?
What if 2 weeks later I discover that the market for the product doesn't exist?
Can I instead build out the product and then sell the intellectual property to the pitch company?
Who owns the intellectual property & code at the end of the weekend if no deal is agreed to?
Are the funders and the pitchers one and the same or different companies?

You've piqued my interest, but there are a lot of details I'd like filled in. Thanks!
Fabric not Uniforms
The only reason I went thru his slides was his starting sentence. "People in Silicon Valley are dicks." Amen to that.
AndroidKickstartR is a dynamic android app generator. It helps to quickly start a project including the libraries you want depending on your needs. Whereas AndroidBootstrap is a more complex and complete template. So, if you don't need some "features" you have to remove the unusable/unused code. So, it really depends on what you need ;)
It would be interesting to see how this landscape evolves. I'm very familiar with the development, having consulted for multiple companies and I know that even for industry veterans, a product is very rarely on time and on budget. What does it mean for kickstarter projects, when the inventor is usually approaching a whole new field?

I'm thinking that there will be a lot more friction between makers and backers as time passes.

I'm sensing that KS is trying to sidestep the issue instead of confronting it. They are in an enviable position now, but it will take little bad press to dethrone them. I'm willing to bet that some major PR mess is approaching KS like a freight train, with all their flattering press and hugely overbacked projects. These will start slipping one by another, as most products do.

KS needs to preempt this by appointing governing/consulting entities to the major projects, making sure things are on time and well communicated to the backers. KS also has to find a milestone scheme where the money gets to the makers on an agreeable schedule, and should consider alternate funding methods like dollar matching with the project maker.

What they run now is a disaster waiting to happen.
Food Sickens Millions as Company-Paid Checks Find It Safe
Assuming that the insurance company actually pays out, this seems like a win for both SpaceX and OrbComm. SpaceX got a paying commercial customer, and had an opportunity to test out yet another part of the Falcon stack. OrbComm got a bit of testing time on their new communication platform at less than the cost of a full launch. If the insurance company is structured properly, this is a loss for them, but will average out over time.

Compare with the age of sail, where a mission was considered successful if one the ships actually returned. Even with 75% of the crew dead and 25% toothless and malnourished from scurvy and other ailments.
It's hinted at by saying that the author feels better about himself now (implied superiority). Whether the particular trait that he feels superior about is "smart" is left up to your imagination!

I heard about the game of life, but I couldn't tell you the rules or describe it exactly. I never bothered to look into it. Judge away!
The quote the very quotable Jason Calacanis "There is no such thing as set-it and forget-it with a website". In other words Jason's thinking was that there are no shortcuts to making money. Of course you can put ads on a parked domain, but that will never make you real money. So you can either:

1. Hold on to them until you get a killer idea

2. Sell them at the right time to the right party to make the most money
Dream on , there is and forever will be only one way , the js/html way. Because it is a priviledge to execute one's code on a client machine , not a right. And i want to know what code you are executing. So the future is transparent programming. If you want more capabilites ask browser vendors more APIs. Doesnt make html/js a great solution , both are just horrible and broken , but that's what we have to work with.
The Man Behind the Troll Who Got Gawker Banned From Reddit
There are also non-busines startups. That is why the Ries definition is the most complete. In the book he defines not-for-profit organizations as startups because they face the same challenges, and thus benefit from the Build-Measure-Learn approach. I'm not arguiing that yours is incorrect, I just reason that as defined by Ries is more complete.
I could help out :)
I see that they've been preserved elsewhere: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Lifeline
No, the risky part was trying to raise the orbit using the F9 upper stage after it had burned more fuel than expected due to the failed engine.

Quoth the article:

> Falcon 9 had enough kerosene fuel left over to relight the engine, but the amount of liquid oxygen "was only enough to achieve a roughly 95 percent likelihood of completing the second burn, so Falcon 9 did not attempt a restart,"

I doubt many satellites have enough maneuvering fuel on-board to raise their orbit like that.
Ask HN: Open Source projects for a C and C++ begginer.
Hello.
I have experience using C and C++, I have done some basic things like a simple Socket Chat application in C or a Space Invaders in C++ using SFML2... but I'd like to read some well documented/written code, understand how it works and try to submit a patch.

I downloaded the Mozilla-Central code because the Documentation is excellent: however it's a really huge project, and not only involves Firefox but most of Mozilla's code base like Thunderbird and Boot2Gecko, and that confuses things even more.

Which one do you suggest ?
No problem :)

Can I find your library on github/googlecode ? You could post an issue or fork the project on github for including your library. I can't promise you that I'll include it, but why not :)
Yes, this is partially my point. IF ONLY YOU KNEW, FRANK. Isn't he so cute thinking that high-quality reproduction will be a thing the average consumer will be clamoring for in the future?
> And NASA doesn't have any reason to accept a risk that doesn't benefit its operations.

Goodwill in the space community and helping to defray costs of future launches by making commercial launches more successful (and thus less expensive, if only for insurance purposes) seem like things that benefit their operations. Perhaps this is a naive opinion, though.
Curiosity Killed the Problem
They aren't because they help shut out the outside world. I don't focus on the music, the music helps me focus on my lifts.
Thanks for the questions!

If you pique whomever pitches the initial problem they agree to mentor your team over three months of building out the product. It would be good to go in with the expectation of starting a real company from this.

If you take seed funding, you and the Band of Angels work out terms. It will probably include setting up a Delaware C corp, equity splits, etc. (I do not speak for them though). Basically, it's figured out as you're taking the seed prize and after the event.

"What if 2 weeks later I discover that the market for the product doesn't exist? Can I instead build out the product and then sell the intellectual property to the pitch company?"

-You're welcome to do that. I won't stop you.

"IP ownership"

-We're not directly linked here, but we've been very clear that in the spirit of the event teams should have all IP ownership. My take is it's equivalent to going into the doctor's office saying "my food hurts" and the doctor analyzing, designing, and building a special shoe that fixes your pain. You wouldn't have IP ownership of the shoe, because all you did was say that your foot hurts. I can make no promises except that we'll be very clear and are partners understand this.

-Ok I read that wrong, though the above is a good thing to include. IP ownership would be the team's and within the team it's up to all of you to figure it out.

"Are the funders and the pitchers one and the same or different companies?"

Primary funders are the Band of Angels, who are not pitching at this one. Funders at the 3 month mark might be the same as the pitchers (that was always the point). You're not committed to take anything, even if you worked on their problem. Given that those pitching are agreeing to help take your company off the ground after the hackathon, hopefully you'd consider their investment.

Let me know if you need more clarification - I'll be adding your questions to the FAQ this weekend. And thanks!
No, orbit isn't orbit. Among many other considerations, the key problem here was that the initial orbit was low enough for atmospheric drag to be a factor, thus why it fell back to Earth after just a few days.
Kids build great stuff.
Last one, promise : 'Opa' Gangnam Style
If you're worried about an incorrect comparison function, you could implement it two different ways.

You could also directly verify (probabilistically) the properties of a total ordering [1]. If your comparison function is "comp" and returns -1, 0, or 1, the tests might go like this:

trials = 1000
while trials > 0:

a = rand_element()
b = rand_element()
c = rand_element()

aa = comp(a, a)
ab = comp(a, b)
ac = comp(a, c)
ba = comp(b, a)
bb = comp(b, b)
bc = comp(b, c)
ca = comp(c, a)
cb = comp(c, b)
cc = comp(c, c)

#reflexive
assert(aa == 0)
assert(bb == 0)
assert(cc == 0)

#antisymmetric
assert(ab == -ba)
assert(ac == -ca)
assert(bc == -cb)

#transitive
assert((ab != bc) or (ab == ac))
assert((ac != cb) or (ac == ab))
assert((ba != ac) or (ba == bc))
assert((bc != ca) or (bc == ba))
assert((ca != ab) or (ca == cb))
assert((cb != ba) or (cb == ca))

assert((ab != 0) or (ac == bc))
assert((ac != 0) or (ab == cb))
assert((ba != 0) or (bc == ac))
assert((bc != 0) or (ba == ca))
assert((ca != 0) or (cb == ab))
assert((cb != 0) or (ca == ba))

trials -= 1

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order
Unusually clear and detailed article from Reuters. Kudos to Ms. Klotz.
I have no sympathy for Kickstarter. Their criteria for submissions can be very inconsistent.
I'm torn here. Probably won't post them all - though I'm sure we'll be posting some of them (there may be some problems our partners would be unhappy about us posting.)
that's why there is microsoft in the domain name ?
Why Is This Man Running For President Of The Internet?
When Amazon launched it was pretty unique. Trying to sell books in a different way.

Zappos had/has a unique customer support scheme that made/makes them very unique.

Heroku took hosting to a new level, in 2007 it was not so easy to find scalable application hosting.

Compare Github to Sourceforge. Github is pretty unique the way it adds the social element.
> And i want to know what code you are executing.

Have you ever actually tried to read JS code that's been through a minifier, or worse, the Closure Compiler? It's not impossible, but neither is reading disassembled machine code. Either way, you don't have anything close to the original source code.
Mindfulness to Go: How to Meditate While You're On the Move is practical and written with Western reader in mind.
It bothers me that 'starting a new app' is a repetitive enough task that something like this is considered useful. Is this really something anyone ought to be be doing twice a week?
I guess, in the same sense that the implementation of any local binary executable is "all there" because you could theoretically figure out what all the machine code does. (But granted, I'm sure that reverse-engineering obfuscated JS is generally much easier than reverse-engineering a binary.)
Great post! Content marketing has always been a difficult one for me, since I would rather spend my time either writing code or talking to potential customers. Content strategy was the most important factor in high user acquisition or growth for most successful SaaS companies.
I really liked the ladder of content types and the advice around starting small.
The Opa Framework for Javascript
I guess you are thinking Visual Web Optimizer. No, I am not a part of VWO and also not an employee of a company that is a direct competitor to Optimizely. Adding to what user 'litek' mentioned, there are at least a dozen well known competitors in the A/B, MVT space.
You're missing the point.

The whole reason we use jet aircraft is because it allows us to travel faster for the same amount of fuel. Passenger transport of all forms is mainly about pushing air out of the way and the air at 40,000 feet is very thin. The fuel you use staying airborne is more than paid back by the fuel you save in aerodynamic drag due to the thinner medium.

If speed is no longer a priority, then that tradeoff collapses. Keeping people comfortable for long periods requires mass, which is very expensive to put in the air, but practically free to move by sea or rail. You're then left offering passengers the choice between two equally efficient options - spend three days in an economy class seat, or three days in a sleeper cabin with a full-sized bed, a shower, room to stretch your legs and a view from the window.
And I bet the insurance company will make the money back over time on subsequent successful launches (among other insured activities).
Xconomist of the Week: Bill Warner's Rules for Angel Investing
nice punch-up: "The first system of cellular automata was developed in the 1940s by John von Neumann as an exercise to understand the problem of building self-replicating robots. As the Terminator franchise did not exist in von Neumann’s time, this was generally accepted as being a Good Idea."
PayPal Said to Cut as Many as 400 Jobs
edit: Hall, humiliated, quit midway through 1983,
should read 1993
Indeed competition is good, and I'm sure github is watching their potential competitors and customer actions like a hawk (despite their huge presence, github is definitely not stodgy and slow-moving).

Github charges as they do because they have so much mindshare—for now, at least, github is the place to be, and the default choice for many—that they can charge that much, even if it's painful for some. That's probably only going to change if their paying customers start moving elsewhere in significant numbers.

Of course there are very poor startups etc that want private repos, but cannot afford github, and that clearly represents a niche and an opportunity for their competitors. That's a good thing, and will tend to keep github honest. Github's appeal will in turn motivate their competitors to improve and innovate. Win-win!

That said, the article title (I'm not going to give them a pageview) is nothing but trolly flamebait, and never should have made it to HN. [EDIT: I notice they've tried to tone down the title since the original posting...]
Glad to hear it! I think it's difficult for a lot of people, at companies large and small.

Startups, in my opinion and us included, need to get better at separating marketing, lead gen and actual sales. It all starts with understanding where demand comes from. Based on the research I've read, for SaaS companies, about 65% of the demand comes from marketing activities.

Content marketing forms the basis of these activities, so figuring out how to really make it scale, regardless of the size or stage of the company, is critical.
If they have a policy at all going forward. I'm actually very curious which insurance company wrote up a policy like this and what the structure looks like (not that we'll be able to get access to that info, but still..)

There are very few insurance carriers on earth that write "specialized risk" like this -- it was most likely one of very few large multinational carriers or, more likely, a Lloyd's syndicate.

The problem is that these very same carriers are, somewhat ironically, exceedingly risk-averse. They pat themselves on the backs and tell each other how smart they are when their bets go well ("Ha! We got $2M in premium for that satellite launch and didn't have to pay out a penny") and they are very quick to play Monday Morning Quarterback when their bets go wrong, especially when it's the first launch ("Johnson, you are a foolish underwriter. How could you write that risk? Get off the risk immediately.")

As frustrating as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if they either cancelled the policy (if the policy covered multiple launches) or non-renewed after this failure and claim the risk profile changed or something like that.
Interesting theory. My theory is that Flash doesn't make Adobe any money, so they don't have any resources working on it.

I'd happily work on Flash if it was a Google product, for example. I don't think it's a black mark, but if it was, I would just say, "Oh, I optimized a virtual machine for running lightweight dynamic languages" or something that's not obviously "I designed the Macromedia Flash Plugin". (But I wouldn't want to work for Adobe, even though they do have some successful products.)
I'm the author of android bootstrap. Its built to work with maven and particular libs that are very common. Its very opinionated and will evolve over time. Each tool has their own value prop. Bootstrap is one for a example app or template while kickstatr is different. These tools are very useful and save a ton of time. Try to get roboguice 2 working with action bar sherlock with maven in under 10 minutes without a template/generator. Yeah good luck. Now you'll see the value of both/either.
Brute force:

Allocate a certain room and time religiously where you will sit down every day. Reduce distractions to nil zealously.

Sit on the floor, cross your legs and close your eyes.

Now focus on taking deep slow breaths. Every time a thought comes, and you get focused on it, relax and let it go. Refocus on your breath.

Its more practice than technique.

The aim is pretty simple - be able to witness your thoughts and let them go. Finally you reach no thought.
What useful basis does it provide?
"PayPal is eliminating jobs primarily in its product and technology groups"

Yikes - that kind of surprises me. Braintree and Stripe will be sending out the recruiters......
Thanks for the long and thoughtful comment. I'll try to answer all of your questions point by point.

Regarding the 1.3 billion visitors: we define this as the sum of all the unique visitors to each experiment that have been run through Optimizely. We purposely avoided calling them 1.3 billion "unique" visitors because some people will be bucketed into multiple experiments and across multiple customers. We purposely do NOT include people who were not bucketed as part of the experiment/control groups. If we did, this number would likely be much higher since many of our customers use our traffic allocation feature that let's them only sample a small fraction of their traffic to include in the experiment: http://support.optimizely.com/customer/portal/articles/58196...

I wholeheartedly agree with your point that many of the players who started after 2008 have far superior implementations due to the advancements in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize. We certainly stand on the shoulders of giants. We would not exist as a company without jQuery, Akamai, Google App Engine, and Amazon Web Services. Not to mention the fact that browsers are much faster and can execute JavaScript in real-time to manipulate the DOM before the page is rendered in the browser and shown to the user.

As for revenue numbers: one of the advantages we have as a startup is that we are not required to publicly tell the world how big we are. If Omniture knew how big we were they might actually allocate resources to try to improve their products.

You are right that many of our 2,800+ customers pay us far more than our highest listed price of $399.

As for top customers in the categories you mentioned we are thrilled to have Disney, Starbucks, Salesforce, Crate&Barrel, GoDaddy, Footlocker, Electronic Arts, CareerBuilder, and more. It's refreshing to see companies that are traditionally "sold to" using a enterprise sales approach who are eager to embrace the shift to more nimble products that "just work." Old school sales tactics are falling on deaf ears as companies shift toward purchasing more like consumers. The vast majority of our customers come to us through word-of-mouth. We are riding the wave of the consumerization of enterprise.
AMD to Cut Up to 30 Percent of Workforce
Well the IP is global, but the number you provided is ambiguous. Egypt's country code is 20, following 62 is Suez[1]. Search for "+20 62" and you'll see 10 digit numbers that would ring in Egypt instead of Seattle.

As a side note/tip: Most phones these days (well, Android, iPhone, and Skype) accept the + for fully formatted numbers[2]. It makes it handy if you travel and want your stored contacts to work regardless of phone network.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_Egypt

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164
You would be missing the bacteria, which are essential.
> Third, we've learned that if you simply take the plug-in away, users don't upgrade, they switch to one of the other browsers on their system which isn't taking their (potentially similarly vulnerable) plug-in away.

That make sense, and that sounds like the real reason. The first two reasons would work just as well with disabling the plugin entirely without the click to bypass. However, if you think people will ignore the warnings and run another browser entirely, that seems like a good argument for letting them use the plugin with Firefox, as long as you have an appropriately severe warning about what it means to let a site access a vulnerable plugin.